


Reentry

by MsVox



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Bucky Is Really Damn Worried, By How Not Okay Steve Is, Comfort, Established Relationship, Issues With Darkness, Issues with Touch/Personal Space, M/M, Nightmares, Post CATWS, Recovery, steve is Not Okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-18 22:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2364425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsVox/pseuds/MsVox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three nights now, since it began. Three nights of this, over and over, and Bucky can’t pretend he doesn’t hear anymore. </p>
<p>It’s gotten worse. Steve is getting worse. </p>
<p>(In which Bucky finds it in him to cross the gulf between them.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reentry

**Author's Note:**

> Brief and drabble-like. The notions that didn't make it into How The Light Gets In got bigger and became their own thing on the side.
> 
> Warnings for Canadian spelling and sad stuff.

 

When Steve claws awake from yet another dream, fighting horror and swallowing down some helpless cry, Bucky knows for sure it’s gotten worse. Steve is getting worse.

Three nights now, since it began. Three nights of this, over and over, and Bucky can’t pretend he doesn’t hear anymore. It was easy to feign sleep at first, letting Steve think that he hadn’t disturbed the bed enough to wake him. It was easy to stay curled up on his side and keep his breathing even and to think that he was helping. That he was sparing Steve’s pride, that Steve wouldn’t thank him for bringing it up, that dragging it out into the open would only give it more power.

Even all the way over on his side of the bed, his corner, drifting up against the wall where he feels less exposed and far enough from where Steve’s body has made its own groove that he doesn’t feel trapped, Steve’s misery is invasive. Magnetic. It has crossed over into Bucky’s space a little more each night. It touches him even when Steve doesn't, a gravity on him that makes him ache, makes him uneasy. It pulls at him until he has to fight not to fall in closer.

He would fall in, but closer is fraught, dangerous without light. Closer is...

They don't really touch that much, at night. Steve won’t take Bucky in his arms when its not sex, when they can't be face to face and reflecting each other, tempest-tossed and buffeted by euphoria. Steve won’t wrap around him and cover him with his body when the light isn't on, won’t settle his weight on him in any way that could be anything like holding him down. Too much like restraints, like straps on a gurney, the dark too much like frozen unconsciousness.The last time Steve held him tight as they slept, Bucky woke up screaming, thrashing, going straight for Steve’s throat. He nearly crushed his damn windpipe, nearly…

The mess Bucky was after that, for what he’d almost done, it scared Steve deeply enough that he never held him like that again. An arm loose over his waist as they drift off, an ankle hooked around his, but nothing more, and Steve’s been so, so careful to keep his distance when it’s time to come down, time to sleep. Up until now, Bucky’s needed him to be that careful, couldn’t handle more than that. There’s a stretch of bare sheet between them, a desolate little span as bleak as No Man’s Land that up until now Bucky had been grateful for.

It’s a shame, such a damn shame, and Bucky has felt guilty, because Steve has had so little closeness in his life, so little opportunity to just be next to another body, to hold someone near. He craves it, Bucky knows, reveres it so much that he’ll never take it for granted, that he rarely dares to ask for it. Steve wouldn't ask for it now, even as he desperately shoves the covers off and shrinks into himself, heels of his hands pressed against his eyes.

Bucky hesitates to reach for Steve, doesn’t want to confront him with an audience, but…

There’s something different this time. Steve’s never started to shake like this, to breathe in deepening gasps like he’s found something isn’t working right, like he’s trying hard to clamp down on a tide of accelerating panic. Something’s out of hand, something’s _wrong_. Steve is struggling, failing, to put himself back together, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do. He has to do something.

Bucky regrets the way Steve flinches at the sound of his own name, so unexpected, regrets the way he’s fooled Steve into thinking that he’d always slept through this. Caught and self-conscious, Steve rolls away from Bucky, deepens the gulf of space between them. It isn’t a reprimand, it’s not, but it stings like one, and suddenly that distance is unbearably empty and wide. 

“I’m okay. I’m okay. Jeez, Buck, I’m sorry I woke you. I’m okay—”

His voice is so unsteady and Bucky feels like such a coward. Space has always felt safe to him, sacred, but now...

“Hey,” Bucky says, a single syllable thrown out like a line to hold on to, but Steve doesn't reach for it, doesn't answer. Bucky touches him anyways, crosses that gap. Dares, where Steve won’t or can’t. He gets his fingers caught in the sleeve of Steve’s t-shirt and tugs, but Steve won’t face him, shakes his head _no_. Bucky pulls himself close up to Steve’s back instead, and he just holds on, hands full of sweat-damp cotton. He holds on until Steve fills up his senses, until Steve could be the whole world, until the edges of his body are Bucky’s horizon.

Because Steve _is_ his world, his life. They’re twined up in each other’s psyches so deeply that Bucky wonders if he ever existed without Steve, if they’ve only dreamed each other. It’s not healthy. It can’t be healthy, not by any normal metric—as if ‘normal’ could ever really mean anything when applied to them, near-immortal and crumbling—and he’ll start searching, one day, for something beyond Steve by which to define himself. He will, when he’s strong enough. He’ll get there, Steve tells him, and maybe that faith is finally rubbing off on him a little, maybe…

He’s getting there. He’s getting better, and it’s all because of Steve.

He would not be alive but for this man, would not be sane but for this man—for a given value of sane—and he feels like maybe someday he’ll be whole because of this man. Maybe whole _for_ him. And maybe…

Maybe he’s starting to get the picture that Steve might not be whole without him either, that Steve is still struggling for his own sanity. He somehow knows in his bones that Steve is still in such a tight orbit around Bucky that if he crashes and burns… so will Steve. He somehow knows that before he came back, Steve was low enough and alone enough that if death came straight at him hard, he wouldn't have turned it aside.

And that’s a hell of a thing to know, that you’re someone’s last parachute even as you’re screaming down out of the sky yourself. Bucky’s starting to think that…maybe it’s the same for Steve. Maybe Steve’s been trying a little too hard to convince everyone that he’s got his feet on solid ground when really he’d jumped a long time ago and has been free falling ever since, but…

How do you pull up on the stick and save the plane when the nose was aimed for the ground before you even got in the chair? When the hull’s in flames, peeling away piece by burning piece, and nothing can slow down the dive you’re already in?  
  
How do you say goodbye to something that’s both gone forever and still beside you? How do you stop grieving, raging, when you never got a chance to start? How do you swallow a loss that got given half back to you? Half your best friend, half your anchor—half your memories, half your identity. Wrenched from your hands and then shoved back but _wrong_. Sometimes…

Sometimes there’s a No Man’s Land behind Steve’s eyes, too, a bleakness, that Bucky’s starting to understand is the gap between the man Steve knew and the man Bucky’s becoming. Sometimes, Steve lives there, in that grey, aching space where things are and are not at the same damn time and there’s no way to move forward.

Bucky knows that place, lived there for so long, has only just started to leave it behind. He knows the emptiness of it, the terrible void, the despair. For a long time, he thought that void was where he ought to be. Thing is, he’s learned. You have to want to leave. It won’t give you up, let you out, until you stop knowing you belong there.  

“I’m okay, I’m okay…” Steve is saying, over and over, and Bucky’s chest hurts to hear him lie to himself.  
  
“Hold on to me,” Bucky says, gathers him up from behind, nudges Steve’s clenched hands away from his face to twine them in his. “Just—you can hold on, if you gotta. Let me—”

_You don’t have to be okay_.

“I know, alright?" Bucky says, "I know."

And Steve lets go in his arms like they really are falling, and he won’t let Bucky see his face but Bucky feels it on his hands, hot and wet and searing. Steve clings like he’s dizzy, shakes like he’s coming apart. Disintegrating. Like he’s bracing for an impact he doesn’t know he’ll survive, like he knows its all going to crash and burn.

_No, it’s not_ , Bucky thinks, makes a promise to himself, a vow he’ll sign in blood if he has to. _It’s not gonna burn_.

He can’t slow the dive, can’t bargain with gravity, but Bucky doesn’t fucking care. He can damn well choose how he falls, and he’ll fall with his face turned into the gale, knowing who he was then and who he is now and the bloody things that both of them did—and if those two people aren’t the same, if they don’t align right and the weld is ragged and ugly and not quite sound, it doesn’t matter.

Whoever he is, he’ll fall with his arms around Steve, wrapped around him like a heat shield, keeping the worst of the burn for himself. He’s finally strong enough for that, now, just as Steve has finally run out of strength to do it for him. Maybe in the end he can be the brake for both of them, can be the ‘chute that Steve needs to find the ground again. Maybe…

Hey, maybe Bucky can teach Steve a thing or two about what he’s been learning about accepting help, about letting go of pain. Letting little bits of happiness in, one papery fragment at a time. Maybe they’ll learn to find some beauty in the sky they’re falling through.

“We’re gonna be okay,” he whispers, and he presses his face against Steve’s spine, feeling every tremour, every desperate, hitching breath. He erases every inch of space between them, just…holds on. 

However they fall, they’ll fall together—two bodies sharing a single trajectory. He’ll endure anything. He can endure anything now, because of Steve. _For_ Steve. Until they're both safe back on the ground. Until they find the end of the line.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I need to stop listening to Olafur Arnalds' Living Room Songs. His anything, really. It's making me write bleak and tender things. 
> 
> Never thought I'd use my physics, geology of the solar system, and earth & atmo sciences classes to create metaphors and motifs for slash fic. It made me really, really happy to do so.


End file.
